The Emperor's New Road
Meets the Trojan Economy
Reading Jonathan E. Hillman's ground-level account of the Belt and Road Initiative against a domestic framework for hidden market entry — and against the newest Bloomberg data on where China's infrastructure ambitions stand in 2026.
A Horse at the Border Crossing
In 2013, Xi Jinping stood before an audience in Kazakhstan and described a vision that would eventually be called the "project of the century": a trillion-dollar network of roads, railways, ports, and cables radiating outward from China. Seven years later, Jonathan E. Hillman set out to test that vision against the ground — literally, from a checkpoint on the Kyrgyz border to a fishing boat off Djibouti — and found something messier than the maps suggested.
Hillman's The Emperor's New Road: China and the Project of the Century is less a study of Chinese grand strategy than a study of what happens when grand strategy meets terrain, institutions, and the self-interest of the countries it passes through. Its central claim is that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is best understood not as a new Silk Road but as a late echo of nineteenth-century infrastructure imperialism — the era of imperial cable-laying, railway-building, and port concessions that Chinese officials now retrace, sometimes down to the same port towns.
This piece reads Hillman's argument alongside a different but structurally related framework: "The Trojan Economy," an analysis of how market power moves through the American economy via channels that look, on their face, like ordinary commerce — a components shipment, a permitted merger, a portfolio allocation — until their cumulative effect turns out to be structural. The two projects were not written about each other. But set side by side, they describe a shared mechanism operating at two different scales: legitimate channels, individually unremarkable, that accumulate into outcomes the institutions meant to monitor them were not built to see quickly.
Where the Trojan Economy piece tracks that mechanism inside U.S. supply chains, antitrust enforcement, and capital markets, Hillman tracks it across borders — in loan agreements, port leases, and railway contracts that are each defensible on their own terms yet add up, in his telling, to a redrawing of who controls chokepoints from Central Asia to the Horn of Africa. Bloomberg's 2026 reporting on both fronts gives us a chance to check both arguments against the newest available numbers.
Imperial Echoes, Not Ancient Silk Roads
Hillman opens by dismantling the marketing behind the BRI's name. The historical Silk Road, he notes, was a continental phenomenon, not a global one — maritime trade has dominated world commerce since the sixteenth century, well before any of the caravan routes Chinese officials invoke in ministerial speeches. The more useful historical parallel, he argues, is the great-power infrastructure competition of the mid-nineteenth century through World War I, when European and American powers built deepwater ports, railways, and telegraph cables to secure access to foreign markets — often at the expense of the very populations whose land the infrastructure crossed.
The parallel is not merely rhetorical. Hillman traces direct lineages: a Chinese fiber-optic cable now under construction begins at Gwadar, Pakistan — the same port where British colonial telegraph cables once landed. China's naval logistics base in Djibouti sits among five foreign military installations in a country whose "greatest natural endowment," in Hillman's account, is its geographic position rather than any resource. The technologies differ in degree — fiber optics instead of telegraph wire, high-speed rail instead of narrow-gauge track — but the underlying logic of expanding access to foreign markets through infrastructure is, in his reading, remarkably continuous.
Hillman's book was researched from the ground, not from Beijing policy documents — border crossings, industrial zones, and construction sites across nine countries, gathered while the BRI was still in its most active building phase (2017–2019).
What makes the book distinctive within BRI scholarship is its skepticism of both extremes in the Western debate. It resists the "grand strategist" caricature of Chinese planners executing a coordinated global chess move, and it resists the opposite dismissal of the BRI as mere propaganda. Instead, Hillman's chapter-by-chapter fieldwork — profiled below — finds a pattern of overpromising, weak coordination, and genuine local agency that looks less like an unstoppable imperial machine and more like an improvised, often chaotic expansion that succeeds unevenly because the countries it touches are rarely passive.
Seven Geographies, One Pattern
The book's structural spine is geographic: after establishing the imperial-echo thesis in Part I, Hillman moves overland toward Europe (Part II) and by sea toward the Indian Ocean (Part III), before closing on the initiative's most exposed frontier in East Africa (Part IV). Each chapter functions as a case study in how the BRI's promises collide with local conditions.
| Geography | Hillman's Finding |
|---|---|
| Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan) | The "Eurasian point of inaccessibility" becomes a proving ground for overland logistics, but informal payments to border police and half-finished highway segments reveal a gap between the showcase (Khorgos Gateway) and the surrounding infrastructure. |
| Russia | Framed as the BRI's essential gatekeeper across eleven time zones — a relationship built on historical mistrust (the 1900 Blagoveshchensk killings, the 1969 border clashes) now papered over by symbols like the Blagoveshchensk–Heihe bridge. |
| Central & Eastern Europe | The Belgrade–Budapest railway becomes a test case for whether EU procurement law applies to Chinese-financed projects, drawing formal European Commission scrutiny and warnings from German officials that the BRI represents a systemic alternative to the Western model. |
| Southeast Asia | Smaller states are shown to hold more leverage than assumed, playing China off other powers — the region Hillman frames through Mahathir Mohamad's Thucydides-inflected question of how the weak benefit from the powerful. |
| Pakistan | The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the BRI's single largest corridor by promised investment, is described as producing more discord than connectivity — a "black hole" for outside assistance that neither Chinese money nor decades of U.S. aid have solved. |
| Sri Lanka | Hambantota Port becomes the book's signature cautionary tale: a Chinese-built facility on one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, financed through debt the country struggled to service — the case most often cited in the broader "debt-trap" debate. |
| East Africa (Djibouti) | China's first overseas military base sits in a country whose entire economic model is geographic rent-seeking — access sold to great powers, with military basing fees approaching a fifth of GDP. |
The throughline across all seven chapters is not coordinated conquest but uneven improvisation. Hillman's closing chapter, "Refining the Blueprint," documents Xi's own 2019 acknowledgment of the problem: an official BRI advisory panel, composed largely of former heads of state, found that the initiative lacked any centralized coordinating mechanism or clear set of work streams — a striking admission from within Beijing's own orbit, made even as nearly three hundred new deliverables and roughly $64 billion in fresh deals were announced at the same forum.
Two Frameworks, One Mechanism
Set next to Hillman's fieldwork, the Trojan Economy framework's three conditions for what counts as a "Trojan" entry map unexpectedly well onto the BRI's own architecture, even though the two projects concern entirely different economies and were developed independently.
Condition 1 — Legitimate vehicle, structural effect
A components shipment or a portfolio allocation in the U.S. case; a port lease or a railway concession in the BRI case. Each transaction is defensible in isolation — a loan is not an invasion — while its cumulative effect can shift who controls a chokepoint, as at Hambantota or Gwadar.
Condition 2 — A gap between entry rules and outcome rules
In the U.S. case, a tariff schedule taxes finished goods but not the components inside them. In the BRI case, sovereign lending rules and EU procurement law were built for a world without a single non-Paris-Club creditor holding the scale of debt China now holds across the developing world.
Condition 3 — Quiet compounding
Market concentration accumulates before it triggers antitrust scrutiny; sovereign debt exposure accumulates before it triggers a restructuring crisis. Hillman documents this almost project by project — no single CPEC loan looked catastrophic in isolation.
Where the frameworks diverge
The Trojan Economy explicitly disclaims conspiracy — it describes a monitoring lag, not intent. Hillman's fieldwork is more willing to attribute strategic intent to Beijing in specific cases (Djibouti, Gwadar) while still finding as much improvisation and local agency as design.
The comparison is useful precisely because it is not a perfect fit. Both frameworks converge on the same diagnostic question, restated for two different scales: are the institutions responsible for tracking cumulative structural change — antitrust regulators and trade-data agencies in one case, sovereign-debt trackers and multilateral lenders in the other — keeping pace with how fast legitimate transactions can add up? For the American economy, the Trojan Economy piece answers cautiously that monitoring capacity, not any single transaction, is the real variable to watch. Hillman's ground-level answer for the BRI is similar in spirit: the initiative's risks come less from any master plan than from a persistent lag between the pace of Chinese lending and the capacity of borrowing governments — and of Beijing's own bureaucracy — to manage what has already been committed.
What the 2026 Data Says That 2020 Couldn't
Hillman's fieldwork closed around 2019, near the BRI's peak lending years. Bloomberg Intelligence, Bloomberg Economics, and independent trackers such as Boston University's Global Development Policy Center and Griffith University's Green Finance & Development Center have since published a considerably longer data run — long enough to test whether the initiative Hillman described as chaotic and overextended actually contracted, or simply changed shape.
The shape confirms part of Hillman's thesis and complicates another part. It confirms the overextension problem: Chinese overseas lending did contract sharply after 2017, through the pandemic, and through a period of stressed property markets and local-government debt pressure inside China itself — exactly the kind of institutional strain his fieldwork anticipated. But the 2025 rebound to a record $213.5 billion complicates the "BRI in retreat" reading that gained currency in Western commentary during the lending slowdown. Bloomberg's own February 2026 assessment is blunt on this point: the program is not shrinking, it is adapting — shifting from financing megaprojects toward smaller, more selective deals in energy, mining, and what Chinese planners call the "New Three" industries (electric vehicles, batteries, renewables), and functioning increasingly as a long-term development partner for the Global South rather than a one-time infrastructure financier.
This is the same distinction the Trojan Economy piece draws in its own domestic context between headline concentration statistics and market-level measurement: the aggregate dollar figure tells only part of the story, and the composition beneath it — megaproject megaphone diplomacy giving way to quieter mining and battery-supply-chain deals — is arguably the more consequential shift for 2026 and beyond.
Hillman's Gatekeepers Meet Bloomberg's "Camp" Model
Perhaps the most direct point of contact between the book and current market data concerns geography of capital access. Hillman's chapters are, structurally, a survey of gatekeepers — Russia gatekeeping the overland route, Central and Eastern Europe gatekeeping entry to the EU single market, Djibouti gatekeeping the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. Each chapter asks the same question in a different location: who controls the chokepoint, and on whose terms.
Bloomberg's 2026 market outlook describes a structurally similar gatekeeping logic emerging on the investment side of the ledger, at global scale. Rather than a single open system of capital allocation, Bloomberg frames 2026 markets as organizing into a "camp" model — a narrower set of preferential supply chains, trusted investment corridors, and security-linked partnerships, with the United States, its developed-market allies, and select emerging-market democracies inside the preferred camp, and strategic competitors and less-aligned states outside it. Bloomberg treats the question of who sits inside versus outside this system as the defining investment variable of 2026 — ahead of valuation or earnings.
"Who is inside the preferred camp system, who is outside, and what equity markets are levered to that redesign" is, in Bloomberg's own framing, the defining investment question of 2026.
Read against Hillman, the camp model looks like the financial-market mirror of the gatekeeper geography he documented on the ground. Where Hillman found China building infrastructure gatekeepers — physical chokepoints like Gwadar and Hambantota — Bloomberg's camp model describes Western capital constructing its own preferential gatekeeping, sorting portfolio and FDI flows by geopolitical alignment rather than open price competition. Both dynamics arrive through channels that are individually unremarkable: a loan agreement in one case, a portfolio allocation in the other. Both compound into a structural reordering of who has privileged access to growth capital — the same mechanism the Trojan Economy piece identifies inside the U.S. market alone, now visible at the level of the entire global financial system.
Hambantota's Legacy in the Current Debt Data
Hillman's Sri Lanka chapter is the book's most cited case in the broader "debt-trap diplomacy" debate, and it remains the reference point against which newer aggregate data should be checked. The chapter itself is careful — Hillman documents the port's genuine commercial weakness and Sri Lanka's debt distress without asserting that China deliberately engineered default to seize the asset, a more cautious position than much of the debate that followed the book's publication.
Current aggregate figures suggest the underlying dynamic Hillman flagged — heavy, often non-concessional Chinese lending to countries with limited access to other capital — has scaled well beyond the Sri Lanka case. China is now the largest single supplier of bilateral debt to developing nations, holding more than 30 percent of such debt as of the most recent tracking, with roughly 54 of 120 surveyed developing countries carrying Chinese debt exposure, and repayment obligations to Beijing in aggregate now exceeding what the same countries owe collectively to the Paris Club of major Western bilateral lenders. Researchers at AidData have separately documented a comprehensive dataset of more than 13,000 Chinese development-finance projects worth roughly $843 billion, noting that China's international lending has run on a ratio of roughly 31 loans for every 1 grant — semi-concessional and non-concessional debt rather than aid, a pattern consistent with Hillman's own observation that BRI financing behaves far more like commercial lending than like the World Bank's traditional development model.
Where the newest reporting extends Hillman's account is in documenting a second-order effect his fieldwork could only anticipate: with a large share of BRI-era loans now reaching maturity, Chinese state lenders have shifted from disbursing new sovereign megaproject loans toward managing repayment — described by one Lowy Institute-adjacent analysis as China becoming "more debt collector than banker" to a meaningful share of the developing world through the remainder of this decade. That shift is visible in the composition data above: fewer new Hambantota-scale megaprojects, more selective mining and battery-supply-chain deals, and a growing share of Chinese overseas financial engagement devoted to restructuring and collecting on loans made during the 2014–2017 peak Hillman covered directly.
What Both Frameworks Risk Overstating
A rigorous comparison should note the limits on both sides, in the same spirit the Trojan Economy piece applies to its own domestic argument.
- Agency, not just imperialism. Hillman's own fieldwork is his strongest check against overreading the imperial-echo thesis: Southeast Asian and Central Asian states in his account are not passive targets but active bargainers, playing outside powers against each other — a pattern closer to normal small-state diplomacy than to imperial subjugation.
- Concentration statistics can mislead. Just as the Trojan Economy piece notes that headline U.S. market-concentration figures can overstate competitive harm once measured at finer market granularity, aggregate Chinese debt-exposure figures can overstate risk in any single country without country-level context on GDP, debt service ratios, and alternative financing options.
- The camp model cuts both ways. A more security-sorted global capital market can be read, as Bloomberg itself frames it, as a rational response to real supply-chain vulnerabilities rather than as pure market distortion — the same defense offered for tighter U.S. merger-review posture in the Trojan Economy piece.
- "Not in retreat" is not "unconstrained." Bloomberg's February 2026 assessment that the BRI is adapting rather than shrinking should not be read as evidence the initiative has resolved the coordination and debt-sustainability problems Hillman documented — CKGSB's own 2026 reporting notes that a more sluggish Chinese macroeconomic environment, local government debt pressure, and a stressed property sector continue to limit the appetite of Chinese policy banks for new sovereign-backed megaprojects.
One Lag, Two Scales
Read together, Hillman's fieldwork and the Trojan Economy framework converge on a single underlying claim, applied at two very different scales of the global economy: structural power moves faster through legitimate channels than the institutions built to monitor it can track. Inside the United States, that lag runs through auto-parts trade rerouted via Mexico, merger review that has not kept pace with rising concentration, and portfolio capital increasingly sorted by geopolitical alignment. Across the BRI's geography, the same lag runs through sovereign loans that looked individually manageable, port leases that looked individually commercial, and a coordination gap that Xi's own advisory panel admitted existed at the highest levels of the initiative.
The 2026 data updates rather than overturns Hillman's 2020 account. The BRI did contract exactly where his fieldwork suggested it was overextended — megaproject lending, debt sustainability, coordination — and it has recovered exactly where his account suggested Chinese interests were most durable: securing access to critical minerals, energy infrastructure, and long-term development partnerships in the Global South, now running at a record $213.5 billion in 2025 engagement. Bloomberg's camp-model framing suggests the more consequential story for 2026–2027 may not be whether the BRI itself grows or shrinks, but whether the world's capital markets finish sorting into the same kind of bifurcated, alignment-based structure that Hillman found China already building, port by port and railway by railway, a decade earlier.
Sources
Hillman, Jonathan E. The Emperor's New Road: China and the Project of the Century. New Haven: Yale University Press / CSIS, 2020.
Bloomberg Opinion. "Stop Fighting Yesterday's Battle on China's Belt and Road." February 16, 2026. bloomberg.com/opinion
Bloomberg Professional Services. "Global Index 2026 Outlook." January 2026. bloomberg.com/professional
Nedopil, Christoph. "China Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) Investment Report 2025." Green Finance & Development Center, Griffith University, January 2026.
AidData, William & Mary. "Banking on the Belt and Road: Insights from a New Global Dataset of 13,427 Chinese Development Projects."
Council on Foreign Relations. "Belt and Road Tracker." cfr.org/articles/belt-and-road-tracker
CKGSB Knowledge. "China's Belt and Road Enters a New Phase." March 2026.
Lowy Institute–adjacent analysis on Chinese bilateral debt exposure among the 75 poorest nations, cited via Armstrong Economics, May 2025.
Avant-Garde (Ryan F.). "The Trojan Economy: Rethinking Hidden Market Entry in the Modern American Economy." July 9, 2026. avantgardebyryanf.blogspot.com
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